Learn about the collaborations between Maplesoft and the University of Waterloo to provide quality, online education to STEM students. The Möbius platform is an innovative courseware environment particularly designed to meet the needs of STEM education and offer an authoring environment as well as content delivery in one platform.
Creating high quality, interactive online Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) courses has many unique challenges. These challenges can be classified in several different ways: content specific, accessibility issues and cost or resource concerns. The first involves presenting complicated ideas in an interactive or easy-to-understand manner, displaying notation and expressions correctly, and providing assessments that are marked for true equivalency. For example, 1/2 = 0.50 = sin(π/6). The second requires planning, use of specific formats or tags, or providing alternative approaches for those who rely on assistive technology to access web content. Finally, creating high quality content can be done today, but takes significant time and money. The key is to find a cost-effective approach for development and deployment.
Working with the University of Waterloo on design and functionality requirements, Maplesoft has created MöbiusTM. Möbius is a comprehensive environment that facilitates the design, development, and delivery of digital and active learning materials for STEM disciplines. Möbius contains an authoring tool that enables GUI-based creation of learning content including a slideshow-type environment with the ability to embed and synchronize audio, as well as algorithmically generated question content.
Möbius will decrease the time and effort for instructors and development staff to create high-quality, easily maintainable, and accessible learning material. In addition, it will provide instructors and administrators access to analytics that will allow them to assess the use and success of specific learning elements.
The Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Waterloo has the largest concentration of mathematical and computer science talent in the world and has been offering online mathematics courses since 2003 Thirteen years later, over 21,000 Waterloo students have enrolled in an online offer of a for-credit math course and the number of unique users visiting their open educational resources is in the hundreds of thousands per year. The University of Waterloo understands the challenges that fully online math and other STEM development projects encounter.
Maplesoft is an education solution provider with 30 years of experience helping educators implement technology in their courses. Creators of Maple and Maple T.A., Maplesoft is developing a digital interactive online courseware environment called Möbius.